Why the Kid Gloves for Team Romney?

The core claims of Mitt Romney's campaign are false, but he has yet to receive any scrutiny for it.

With regards to Mitt Romney’s renewed attack on President Obama’s economic stewardship, all of the focus seems to be on his assertion that “President Obama has never managed anything other than his own personal narrative.” There’s a little hypocrisy in the blow, given Romney’s complaint that Obama is waging a personal attack against him, but it’s far less important than what follows—-“[Obama] has never created a job and never run a business.”

As Greg Sargent points out, this is a sign that Romney has gone back to the claim that the economy has lost jobs under Obama as a result of the stimulus:

The Romney camp’s claim is that we can calculate that the stimulus destroyed jobs overall with a metric that factors in all the jobs destroyed before the stimulus took effect.

In other words, the Romney campaign wants to make Obama responsible for all jobs lost as result of the economic collapse, despite the fact that it was well underway by the time he entered office. The reality, as I noted earlier, is that the economy has seen 26 months of consecutive private sector job growth. If you exclude the jobs lost before Obama’s policies took effect—which only makes sense—then 4.25 million jobs have been created under the president’s watch:

This isn’t good enough, but it’s a far cry from Romney’s claim that Obama has been a uniquely destructive president for job creation. Which brings me to this point—if there’s anything remarkable about the Romney campaign, it’s the extent to which the core arguments for his candidacy are either false or impossible to substantiate. The claim that Obama is responsible for net job loss? False. The claim that Obama has gone on an unprecedented spending spree? False. And the claim that Romney created 100,000 jobs at Bain Capital? Impossible to prove.

Despite this, the press continues to treat Romney with kid gloves. The question is why? What does Romney need to do to receive any scrutiny for the mendacity that has defined his quest for the presidency?